Title: A simulated annealing-based heuristic for the single allocation maximal covering hub location problem

Authors: Mohamad Saeed Jabalameli; Farnaz Barzinpour; Ali Saboury; Nader Ghaffari-Nasab

Addresses: Department of Industrial Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, 16846-13114 Narmak, Tehran, Iran. ' Department of Industrial Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, 16846-13114 Narmak, Tehran, Iran. ' Department of Industrial Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, 16846-13114 Narmak, Tehran, Iran. ' Department of Industrial Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, 16846-13114 Narmak, Tehran, Iran

Abstract: Hub location problem is one of the most important problems in the areas of logistics and telecommunication network design. In this paper, we address the single allocation maximal covering hub location problem in which the objective is to maximise the amount of covered flows associated with origin-destination pairs in a hub-and-spoke network using a fixed number of hub facilities. Two mathematical programming formulations are developed for the problem and since the problem belongs to the class of NP-hard problems, an efficient simulated annealing (SA)-based heuristic is proposed to solve it. Computational results indicate the efficiency of the proposed heuristic both in terms of solution quality and CPU time.

Keywords: logistics; telecommunications; network design; hub location; maximal covering; simulated annealing; metaheuristics.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMHEUR.2012.048213

International Journal of Metaheuristics, 2012 Vol.2 No.1, pp.15 - 37

Received: 30 Jun 2011
Accepted: 16 Dec 2011

Published online: 22 Oct 2014 *

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